Linux Topics     Hints & Tips     PPP & Tinet     Apps to Use     Getting Linux     Program Development   Which Language??   With all distributions of Linux, C is installed; it has to be! But several other languages are installed as well. With Redhat v5.1, there is also C++, Fortran 77, PERL, TCL/Tk, phyton, sed, awk and more that I don't know about. So the choice is there, it'll depend on what you want to do. Text Processing   If you want to manipulate text, format it or collate it. Sed, Awk, Tcl (pronounced tickle) and Perl are good starting points. I prefer Perl as its syntax is similar to C. It is used a lot in cgi-bin scripting on the web. It has even been embedded in the Apache web server. My Goodness, my GUInness   There are several methods available to develop programs with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). If you want to produce a quick program, TCL combined with Tk (giving TCL/Tk) provides a fast, interpreted program. For another person to use the program, the TCL/Tk interpreter is required. For development using C (and many other languages using bindings) the GTK+ is a very good lightweight toolkit. It emerged from the GIMP project, to take on a life of its own. If you want to use Java, the Swing toolkit can provide a good looking GUI. Swing is available as part of Java v1.2 or separately for Java v1.1. Java for Linux can be downloaded from the Blackdown site. Editors and IDEs   For editing any HTML or PERL scripts I use XEmacs. It is very powerful and versatile. It will handle nearly any other language you give it. If it doesn't, just modify an existing .el file to do what you want it to do. If you don't like all the meta-meta-buckety-buckety type keystrokes, you could always use vi. Desktops   At the moment there are three projects (that I know of) developing a desktop framework. Of the three the GNUstep project is the most ambitious. It aims to develop a free version of OpenStep. It is planned that any program developed for GNUstep will run on any platform that supports it or OpenStep. The other two projects are KDE and GNOME. KDE began as a replacement for the Common Desktop Environment. It uses the Qt toolkit. GNOME stands for Gnu Network Object Model Environment and uses the GTK+ toolkit. It is not as advanced as KDE but it is getting there. With all these desktops, Linux might finally have a coherent UI. More information on all the projects can be found at their respective web sites.